We Still Seek Him

If anyone is late to a birthday party, it’s the wise men. We have had our parties, opened our gifts, cleaned up the house, said goodbye to family, and they still haven’t arrived. Mary and Joseph have left the manger, nursed the baby, and watched him take his first steps, and the wise men are still coming from afar. If we were looking at this in real time. We would celebrate Christmas and the magi wouldn’t arrive until 2-3 years later. Talk about a belated birthday gift. Long past Christmas, and the wise men are still seeking.

Who were the wise men really? There are lots of legends surrounding them. There is a legend that there were only three probably because they brought three gifts. There is of course the most well-known legend that they were all men. There is even a legend where they are given names (Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar) and physical descriptions. Legends of their background (astrologers, philosophers, sorcerers) and where they came from (Persia). Legends regarding the significance of their three gifts. There are also legends about the star. What was it exactly? Was it a supernova, a comet, or an alignment of planets creating a superstar?

But the truth is, we don’t really know. We know that the wise men weren’t Jewish. We know that they were foreigners, going far beyond their homeland and crossing over ethnic, political, and religious boundaries to seek out the child.

We know that they traveled a very long time. Surely they must have wondered if they were still heading the right way. I think sometimes when we hear this story we assume the star kept shining for the whole journey, like a magical GPS dot that always led them forward for a couple of years. But what if it wasn’t that easy? We know that they stopped in Jerusalem to ask King Herod for directions. Even when they weren’t sure, they were still seeking.

Some say the wise men practiced another religion known as Zoroastrianism. They didn’t come to know of the child through Old Testament prophecy. They spoke the language of the stars and the heavens. In this light they experienced awe and wonder, and began to follow.

I don’t know if I have any stargazers in the room with me this morning or any of you who experience awe and wonder by the light of a night sky. It can be hard to notice it sometimes when you are surrounded by light pollution clouding out the natural light of the cosmos.

This past summer the first images of the new James Webb Space Telescope were released. If you haven’t seen them, I encourage you to go and look at them. They really are extraordinary and evoke an experience of awe.

Dr. Bill Brown of Columbia seminary in looking at these images said that there is an emerging scientific field of awe. And he said that all experiences of awe have one thing in common: vastness. This is an experience of feeling so small compared to something so great. It has a tendency to overturn one’s own frame of reference or worldview.

This past summer Jim and I traveled with some friends of ours to Bar Harbor Maine. It was late at night and I told Jim I wanted to go into Acadia National Park to sand beach to star gaze. So the guys drove us out there and my friend and I stood out on the sand and stared up at the sky. The guys kept laughing at us saying, “I’m so glad we drove all the way out here in the middle of the night to look at stars, the same stars we have in Mississippi. What’s the difference?”

But I had never seen stars like this before. All of the distractions weren’t there and it was as if they were bending down in front of my face, a whole galaxy I hadn’t noticed was right there. I was caught up in awe and the vast cosmos of God. I couldn’t unsee it.

I only thought I had seen stars before, but then I really saw the stars. Similarly with the images from the James Webb telescope, you can look at side-by sides of the same nebula, the same galaxies taken with the Hubble verses the James Webb and you realize there is so much more to be seen, so much more to seek. Things we weren’t able to detect before are suddenly right before us. And it changes everything.

I wonder what it must have felt like for the wise men to finally arrive and stare into the face of the child they had been seeking for so long. This was the epiphany, the revealing or the appearance of God that begins our epiphany season this morning. Dr. John Philip Newell said that “it should not so much be understood as the appearance of God as the transparence of God. The divine light that shines in the child is not a foreign light to the earth. It is the light at the heart of all life. It is the light from which all things come. If somehow this light were extracted from the universe, everything would cease to exist. So this is a story about the light at the heart of everything, the light at the heart of you, the light at the heart of me.”

Kevin Hainline, an astronomer who was helped to launch the James Webb telescope, gazed at the images for the first time and said, “I think that this is why the total obvious purpose, the meaning of life, the reason why we are here is not to destroy. It is not to other each other. It’s literally to love each other.”

I wonder what it must have been like for the wise men. Perhaps we assume that the manger was the end or culmination of their seeking, but I like to think that maybe they realized it was only the beginning. Once they saw the light of Christ, everything changed. At this point, gifts were secondary. They worshiped this tiny baby boy, in which the light of heaven was contained. They went home by another way, protecting the holy family. The epiphany changed their trajectory. Before the manger they followed the light. After the manger they were filled with the light.

This is the light of awe and wonder, the revelation of Christ. It is the light that changes everything, the light that is the heart of God, and the light that is the source of love.

So what will this year reveal for you? What will you seek? How will your star words guide you this year? Maybe you think you’ve seen it all. That this year couldn’t possibly hold anything new. No magical epiphanies in your future. Just the same-old, same-old.

Bishop Sharma Lewis, our new Bishop for the MS Conference, has challenged everyone this year to join her in reading through the Bible in a year with the sole purpose of seeking the Word. I am planning to join her, and I hope you will as well.

What if we believed that God still has a word for us this year, is still up to something? What if this year we made some resolutions of the soul? To seek to learn something new, to seek to be more loving to our neighbors and our enemies, to seek to drop some bad habits, to seek forgiveness and peace, to seek out the lost and to stand for the vulnerable, to seek to let all the little things go and laugh more, to seek to challenge ourselves and step outside the comfort zone, to seek first the kingdom of God, to seek to hunger and thirst for righteousness. What if we keep seeking?